From electronic medical record (EMR) systems to wearable devices, technology is helping to raise the standard of care across Canadian hospitals.
“Like it or not, technology is increasingly going to be part of [healthcare],” Tracie Risling, an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s nursing college, tells the Canadian Nurse Association. “We’re only going to get more and more connected.”
While digital solutions offer Canadian hospitals serious advantages, they should ultimately make nurses and doctors’ jobs easier, not harder. Technology that’s poorly introduced or too complicated for staff to use can be counterproductive to a hospital’s goals and have damaging effects on health workers.
As it stands, the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions found that nurses have been working an average of 78% more overtime hours since the start of the pandemic. These overworked nurses don’t have spare time to learn new digital skills or take extensive training around technology — especially if they don’t see the value in using it.
Hospital legacy systems can also pose major obstacles when integrating a new solution, often preventing facilities from building seamless and legally-compliant processes for sharing information.
Yet, the right value-adding technology can overcome these challenges and give staff the critical support they need to improve experiences and processes for hospital patients, nurses and doctors.
Moving Beyond the Challenges: Adopting Better Smart Solutions
Your hospital’s outdated technology may not be intelligent enough to collect actionable patient data or offer workers simple ways to make their jobs easier and more impactful. To maximize the efficiency and positive impact of nurses, hospital leaders can equip staff with smart technologies that centralize and streamline communication, breaking down information silos between teams and departments.
Not all technology is easy to adopt, though.
For the best results, new technology needs to be completely intuitive and integrate seamlessly with existing systems — including your hospital’s EMR and asset-tracking system. This will help your hospital avoid confusing staff, collect insightful patient data compliantly, give nurses and doctors access to a unified network of information and boost the overall quality of care.
“We know emergencies can escalate in scope and severity quickly impacting hospital resources and threatening the vital and often lifesaving care we provide to patients and the community,” states the manager of enterprise risk at Mackenzie Health, Zeeshan Ahmed. “So, when every second counts, technology is helping to connect teams to respond faster and more effectively.”
By giving hospital staff access to helpful technology that’s easy to use and integrate into their essential systems, hospital leaders can reduce nurse burnout and better serve patients by automating manual tasks.
Take connecting with a patient’s regular healthcare provider, for instance.
Emergency departments in Canada typically only contact the family doctors of around 50% of admitted patients.
Hospitals can opt for smarter technologies that can speed up how a hospital connects with family doctors, engage patients with personalized care plans and initiate consistent, ongoing communication with external doctors and caregivers.
The bottom line is that there’s plenty of technology available to hospitals that can improve the way nurses and doctors operate without adding to their burnout. You just need the proper partner to help implement effective technology successfully based on your facility’s particular needs and challenges.
Selecting the Right Technology To Empower Your Healthcare Workforce
Identifying the technology that can help your hospital’s workforce excel isn’t always an easy task. That said, it’s important to select a technology vendor that has proven success for staff process improvements at Canadian hospitals.
GetWellNetwork smart technology — which is implemented and supported by PX Solutions— for example, has been successfully adopted by Mackenzie Health’s Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital in Ontario. Not only is this platform built with an intuitive user interface, but it can also integrate with existing EMR and legacy systems, removing communication and information barriers.
With Get Well, hospitals can reduce patient complications by up to 54% thanks to its ability to free up time for staff and provide nurses with centralized patient monitoring and engagement capabilities.
Hospitals using GetWell Rounds+, a digital solution that allows nurses to streamline manual rounding and communications processes, have also experienced 20% increases in staff efficiency. Moreover, this technology can integrate with other Get Well solutions to offer nurses an automated method to capture and record patient data and insights in a compliant way.
Meanwhile, healthcare teams can take advantage of GetWell Inpatient, which gives staff the tools they need to improve the standard of care through interactive and personalized care plans for patients.
“When nurses use technology as a tool to provide more individualized care, they are applying experiential knowledge and providing better care,” says Julia Imanoff, a perinatal nurse specialist.
Take your first step toward empowering your staff, reducing nurse burnout and elevating the standard of their care by contacting PX Solutions today.